Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

The Republican Platform 2016 offers a fresh plan for an old GOP target: it calls for converting the EPA into a bipartisan commission. As Pro's Alex Guillén writes,
the platform says that air and water has been getting cleaner over the
last few decades, and that trend will continue with no further
regulatory action. Republicans are proposing a "modern approach to
environmentalism ... We propose to shift responsibility for
environmental regulation from the federal bureaucracy to the states and
to transform the EPA into an independent bipartisan commission, similar
to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with structural safeguards against
politicized science." Stopping work on climate change: The platform also calls for
an end to most of the Obama administration's work on curbing climate
change. It demands an "immediate halt" to funding for the U.N.’s
Framework Convention on Climate Change, including the Green Climate
Fund, which is intended to help poorer nations stave off the effects of
climate change. The platform opposes "any carbon tax," and it says the
party "will do away" with the Clean Power Plan. It also dings
renewables, notably leaving solar and wind out of a key sentence: "We
support the development of all forms of energy that are marketable in a
free economy without subsidies, including coal, oil, natural gas,
nuclear power, and hydropower." Wind and solar get the party's backing
only when funded through private capital. Ending 'sue and settle': The platform also calls for the end
of what it calls the practice of "sue-and-settle" litigation, which is
when "environmental groups sue federal agencies whose officials are
complicit in the litigation so that, with the taxpayers excluded, both
parties can reach agreement behind closed doors. That deceit betrays the
public’s trust; it will no longer be tolerated." The lawsuits are
typically brought by environmental and public health groups to force the
agency to meet statutory deadlines. And so much more: Republicans also call for a streamlining of
permitting for power transmission lines, and they'd like to revise the
National Environmental Policy Act, the law that requires environmental
reviews for those projects. And the platform seeks to drastically reduce
federal property holdings, calling for transferring "certain federally
owned land" to the states...more